Greetings, greenies. I’m fresh off a very informative session on chicken-keeping at the Backyard Revolution section of the Albemarle County fair. Check out the Revolution at the Heritage Harvest Festival if you missed it this weekend. But first, read these:
A perhaps dispiriting report on bisphenol A on the undersides of home canning lids. Sheesh! I’ve noticed some lids don’t have the guilty white coating, so I’ll be seeking those out for the rest of my canning projects this year.
The city is considering putting limits on the number of yard sales you can have (which I predict will lead to more stuff in landfills) and is also looking for new ways to recycle the Downtown Mall bricks, after grinding them up for trail surfaces turned out not to work. Let them know what you think, city residents.
Here’s a rather astounding one. Wal-Mart is planning to put a sustainability index next to every item it stocks. I am forced to grudgingly admire the company’s ambition in this area, even as the news (like its previous moves toward greenness) makes it more and more bizarre, to my mind, that it would insist on building a store on or next to a Civil War battlefield. Their PR people need to be slapped around a little.
Speaking of PR, it looks like a crazy bicyclist is about to hit our city, one stop on a 5,000-mile ride (dang!) meant to promote another bike ride, the Brita Climate Ride, which happens in September and will raise money for fighting climate change. Don’t know if we’ll easily be able to spot this guy when he rides in, but, um, yay for bikes!
And for the new pavilion that houses the Scottsville farmers’ market!
One more good development: the U.S. Green Building Council, which administers the much-vaunted LEED program for certifying sustainable buildings, will now require all LEED projects to actually track how they perform in terms of energy and water use. I’m a fan of the LEED program for sure and I think this will do a lot to strengthen it and help us learn about better buildings.
Got more links? As always, post them up, please.